Tales of the City 05 - Significant Others

clock. Seven thirty-seven. “O.K., Puppy, go pick out a tape.” This was his usual ploy to get her out of the room while he pulled on his bathrobe. It was no big deal to him, but Mary Ann thought it “inadvisable” that he walk around naked in front of Shawna. And Mary Ann should know; she was the one with the talk show.
    “No,” said Shawna.
    “What do you mean, no?”
    “No VCR. Go see Anna.”
    “We’ll do that, Puppy, but not yet. Anna’s asleep. Go on now … pick out a tape. Mommy brought you Pete the Dragon and Popeye, and I think there’s—”
    A whine welled up in the child. She pawed the carpet belligerently, cutting a silvery path through the powder-blue plush. He couldn’t help wondering if parenting was an age-related skill like warfare—tolerable, even stimulating, at twenty, but inescapably futile at forty.
    He looked his daughter in the eye and spoke her name—her given name—to signal his seriousness. “I want you to go pick out a tape before Daddy gets unbelievably mad at you. We’ll go see Anna later on.”
    Shawna’s lower lip plumped momentarily, but she obeyed him. When she was gone, he dragged himself to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. The floor was still wet from Mary Ann’s frantic ablutions, so he mopped it with a damp towel and tossed the towel into the laundry hamper.
    He hesitated before weighing himself, then decided that the ugly truth was a surefire antidote for his late-night jelly doughnut binges. The scales surprised him, however. He had lost four pounds in four days.
    This made no sense to him, but he had never been one to argue with serendipity.
    Shawna threw her usual tantrum over breakfast. This time her yogurt was the wrong color and there wasn’t enough Perrier to make her cranberry juice “go fizzy.” Would she ever tire of testing him?
    After breakfast, according to custom, he let her pick out her clothes for the day. She chose a green cotton turtleneck with ladybugs on the arm and a pair of absurdly miniature 501’s. He dressed her, then left her in the custody of Robin Williams and the VCR while he changed into his own version of her ensemble.
    The clock said eight forty-six when he went to the window and peered down twenty-three stories into the leafy green canyon of Barbary Lane. From this height, Anna Madrigal’s courtyard was nothing more than a terra-cotta postage stamp, but he could still discern a figure moving jauntily along the perimeter.
    The landlady was making her morning sweep, brandishing a broom so vigorously that the ritual seemed more akin to exercise than to practical considerations of cleanliness. Later, she would cross the postage stamp diagonally and sit on the bench next to the azalea bed. For all her professed free-spiritedness, she was a creature of blatant predictability.
    He lifted his gaze from the courtyard and surveyed their vista, a boundless sweep of city, bay and sky stretching from Mount Diablo to Angel Island and beyond.
    There were no chimney pots or eucalyptus branches blocking their vision, no unsightly back stairwells or rocky rises framing some half-assed little chunk of water. What they had at The Summit was a goddamn view —as slick and unblemished as a photomural.
    And just about as real.
    Sometimes, when he stared at the horizon long enough, their teal-and-gray living room lost its identity altogether and became the boardroom of a corporate jet dipping its wings in homage to the Bank of America building.
    Today, the sky was cloudless and the air was clear. No hint of the holocaust raging sixty miles south of the city. There, amid the brittle manzanita brush of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a jagged trail of fire seven miles wide had already blackened fifteen thousand acres and driven five thousand people from their homes.
    But not here at The Summit. Nature wouldn’t stand a chance at The Summit.
    He sometimes wondered about that preposition. Should he tell people he lived at The Summit, in The Summit or on The Summit? Usually, when pressed, he admitted to 999 Green and left it at that.
    If he was embarrassed, he had every right to be. He’d lived in the shadow of this concrete leviathan for nearly eight years, cursing it continually. Now, at his wife’s insistence—and using his wife’s money—he’d joined the enemy in a big way.
    They had done it for Shawna. And for security. And because they needed a tax shelter. They had also done it because Mary Ann wanted a glossier setting for her